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(Book 1 of the Inheritance trilogy)

Disclosure: I know and like the author and got the ARC from her. Book coming out in Feb. 2010.

In the world of the hundred thousand kingdoms, there were once three gods. But things changed, and now one rules while the Arameri, a mortal family, enslaves four other gods. Yeine's mother was the heir to the Arameri before she married Yeine's father, who was seen as a barbarian from Darr. Now, Yeine has been called back to the palace Sky, and she's immediately thrust into family politics.

I love so much about this book. First, I have a huge love of court politics and intrigue, and this book is chock full of secrets and secret histories and people never quite saying what they mean and nothing looking like what it is. Yeine is by nature straightforward and blunt, but she must adapt to Sky, which differentiated this book from others with protagonists who aren't good at intrigue. Too often I feel those other books minimize the dangers of a slip up and focus instead on what a breath of fresh air the protagonist is, or they have the protagonist know nothing of intrigue and yet come out on top anyway. Yeine, on the other hand, makes deadly mistakes, and everything has a cost.

I also love the world of the book, from the palace of Sky, balanced above the city of Sky on a thread-like column, to the legends of the three gods to the little we see of Darr's matriarchal culture. I love the bound gods and the way Jemisin makes them all frightening and awe-inspiring and yet vulnerable and hurt at the same time. I read a review somewhere and of course promptly forgot who wrote it, but the person talked about the interesting complications of slavery and power with the gods, who are enslaved and yet have enormous amounts of power, and with the Arameri family, some of whom are servants and yet still have the power to command enslaved gods.

It's a fantasy book that feels new and different, and considering that I've mostly stopped reading non-YA fantasy because I've been so bored with it, that in and of itself made me so happy. And in addition to all that, the prose is lovely. I adore the narrative voice, which occasionally rambles and talks to itself and corrects itself.

Overall, highly recommended. As I've said, I haven't been reading fantasy that isn't YA for a long time because I've felt it had very little left to offer me. I'm glad I was wrong, and this book has me craving a) more from the world and b) more wonderfully satisfying world-building and characterization in general.

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(review courtesy of an ARC from a friend, details on how to get it below)

Jace Witherspoon has just been kicked out of the house for daring to hit his abusive father, and he lands on the doorstep of his brother Christian, who got out years ago and never looked back. Christian's not too happy to have his past in his present again, and the two of them have a lot to work through, especially since their mother is still with their father.

Warning: given the subject matter, there are some scenes in the book that may be extremely triggery in terms of emotional mindfucks and physical abuse.

This is a YA book about domestic violence and child abuse that goes way beyond problem novel; it reminded me a lot of Fruits Basket in how Avasthi looks at how the consequences of abuse and the way silence can be a prison. Nothing is easy. Jace is resentful that his brother was able to cut him and his mother off, Christian almost cannot bear to talk about the past he left behind, Jace is afraid of being around the girl he's attracted to for fear he'll turn into his father, Christian is afraid the new information about his past will hurt his relationship to his current girlfriend. And through it all, Jace still loves his father despite the abuse, and although he is trying his best to get his mother out of the situation, he also resents her for not protecting him.

The book's center is the relationship between the brothers, but I loved the female characters as well. The boys are white, but Jace's girlfriend Mirriam is Asian, and I was trying to figure out if Dakota is Native or Latina (she is described as having blue-black hair, they're in New Mexico, and at one point she feeds Jace fry bread). There's also Jace's ex-girlfriend Lauren; Caitlyn, a stereotypical slutty cheerleader who is less stereotypical than she seems; and of course, Jace and Christian's mother. In a book like this, they could very easily become props for the boys' emotional development, but I think Avasthi manages to avoid that. Sometimes Mirriam felt a little too much like a healer character for me—she's a teacher and a social worker—but I very much liked how she had her own relationship with Jace independent of Christian, albeit not uninfluenced by him.

Despite deepad's comments, I was originally wary that the book was about two white guys, but after reading the book, I think the author made the right choice. Making them POC gets a little too close to all the POC problem novels I've read, and it would feel too much like all the media stories about POC broken families. Also, because the book does a lot of questioning of masculinity and abuse, having the guys and their father as POC could have read as "dangerous, scary, and/or misogynistic POC guy."

ETA (this paragraph): Also! I forgot to say that the one thing I did find missing because the family was "normative" was an acknowledgment of the way the legal system and the system of shelters don't work and are frequently dangerous for trans people, PWD, lower-class people, gay and lesbian people, POC, etc. I was thinking specifically of Andrea Smith's discussion of overturning the "shelter" idea in Conquest and the essays on South Asian women's grassroots movements against domestic violence and looking for a different kind of solution in Dragon Ladies.

Mostly I want to give this to guys for the way it examines masculinity. There was this interesting thing in which I was completely invested in Jace's journey and sympathized with his anger issues and his violence, and yet, when it came to him as a romantic lead, I could totally see why a woman would be afraid of him. Because I was. And the tension in my own head between wanting to forgive him and say it's okay versus being afraid and also saying, "No, never okay," the way it so echoed the way abusers get forgiven, was fascinating and a bit chilling.

( Spoilers flail and squee )

And finally, the book is about silence and giving voice to things, on the way abuse takes place behind closed doors, how it's perpetuated when you don't talk about it, when you make polite little lies, when you've told so many lies that you no longer know what's healthy, so much that your very body reacts differently.

Highly recommended.

---

I got this book from deepad, who's friends with the author. The book's publication date is 2010, but Deepa's currently trying to get word around the blogosphere:

I'm going to send my ARC out into the wild, into the world of book bloggers. There are only two conditions -

1. You have a month to read it, after which you must pass it on.
2. You must, if you read it, blog about it. (Which means at least two paragraphs, in fairness to reviewing standards.)

If you're interested in reading, comment on her post and let her know! I have already been trying to sic this on several people, muhahaha.

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Justine Larbalestier, whose books all feature protagonists of color, posts about the white washing of her latest book:

The notion that “black books” don’t sell is pervasive at every level of publishing. Yet I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them Until that happens more often we can’t know if it’s true that white people won’t buy books about people of colour. All we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell. The same is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers.”

Susan from Color Online (good blog on YA books by and about POC) also adds:

Very few have responded to my comment about the absence of color among book bloggers. Those marketing folks didn't come to that conclusion without some basis in what they see. Something shaped their perception.

What is important has already been said: this is not a new issue; it is a self-perpetuating cycle contributed by bookstore shelving, marketing expectations, and aversive racism from readers and reviewers; it is symptomatic of the larger issues of racism; and it hurts readers of color.

( Book list )


Color Online is also running a book giveaway to promote YA authors of color.

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I think this book grew out of Anderson's thesis work about Native women, and in it, she explores the ways Native women's identities have been constructed pre-colonization, how colonization destroyed many of Native women's roles and enforced white patriarchy, and how Native women are reclaiming their identities.

In the introduction, Anderson introduces the idea of the subjective reader and writer. You would think this wouldn't be so revolutionary, but grad school classes on sociology seem to indicate otherwise! Going with this, Anderson introduces herself as a light-skinned Cree/Mé woman who grew up without much contact with Native communities and notes how this affects her as an author and as a researcher. She also asks readers of the book to examine their own motives for reading the book. Are they Native women looking for support or affirmation? Are they non-Native people looking to learn about "Native culture"? Are they white feminist? Etc.

My own personal reading context is as a Chinese woman who knows very little about Native cultures looking for more information on Native feminism (there is probably also a better term for this I do not know) after reading Andrea Smith's Conquest and reading blogs and posts from Native women online. I'm also looking for alternatives to "mainstream" feminism, not to adopt, but to have a better feel for where I'm ignorant.

As I had expected, there were times when it was hard for me to read this book because I had to stomp on the part of my brain that was like, "But! Excluding women from blahdiblah means blahdiblah! Clearly delineated male and female roles means blah!" It helped that Anderson herself was also working through her own understanding of past traditions and how to adopt them to today, on what things have changed and should stay changed and on what things have changed and should be reverted.

As an example: I saw her explanations of keeping women on their period outside of drum circles and sweat lodges as a veiled "I roll my eyes at the white women who keep wanting to join the sweat lodge or drum circle and protest their exclusion while having no idea what it actually means." Anderson's explanation is that women on their period already have a great deal of power, and not as a negative thing. But she also notes that in the present day, keeping menstruating women out of a specific activity can be done in a misogynist fashion not in the spirit of tradition and adds that the menstruating women should have their own area to retreat to, that they should not be ignored or ostracized. It looks like a fairly complicated situation trying to balance imported misogyny and return to tradition and how notions of tradition change over time, and I bet it is not a situation where it is helpful for white feminists to barge in and say, "This is what is feminist."

Anderson structures the book in three parts: examining the past, looking at the present, and envisioning the future. She goes through the general gender equity in many Native societies pre-colonization and talks about exceptions and norms, which was very helpful for me, because I have zero background in this. She also covers what happened once white colonization began and what that did to many Native societies, particularly the use of white patriarchy as a tool of colonization, which was more familiar to me. Although some of the book talks about Anderson's own journey, she has also talked to quite a few other Native women (mostly Canadian) about their own experiences.

I'm not doing the book justice; I found it thought-provoking and challenging. I value it for making me continue to rethink what I normally conceptualize as "feminist" and for offering a non-white feminism, especially one that emphasizes community child-raising, family, and the overall community.



I also posted a list of all the Native authors in the bibliography if people are interested.

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Tiffany Hunter is a fairly normal teenager: she's delighted to be going out with her boyfriend, although her father's not too happy he's white; school is the suck; her dad is super mean; and she really just wants to do exciting stuff and everyone is keeping her from it. And then her father takes on a mysterious lodger who keeps strange hours and never eats anything.

Everything makes this sound like your standard vampire story, except it's not. There's no over-the-top forbidden romance, Tiffany is very much a teenage brat at times, and I want to give it to everyone reading up on MammothFail as an example of SF/F with Native people done well, where there is a sense of history and loss and there are also Native people with phones and sneakers and aren't savage or stoic but just people.

Pierre is an especially great look at vampires done right (says she who is rather tired of vampires); he's creepy and dangerous and not human and very, very, very old. I miss the last part in many vampire books and am always skeptical as to why a several-hundred-year-old entity would want to date a high schooler, and Taylor nicely avoids that. In fact, this reminds me a great deal of Annette Curtis Klause's The Silver Kiss in how it deals with a vampire and a teenaged girl, although making both of them Native changes the story.

And then there's the final chapter, and it has elders teaching the younger generation and the loss of language and culture and history and the past come to life again and finding your roots after you thought you had lost them, and I love it.

Very much recommended, and thanks so much to maerhys for giving it to me!

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/835889.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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Nobody Owens' family was killed was he was an infant, and to protect him from the killer, the denizens of the local graveyard adopt him, give him the Freedom of the Graveyard, and raise him. Bod learns important things like Fading and inflicting Night Terrors, he is protected by the mysterious Silas, and he grows into a rather odd, pale boy.

Gaiman says he modeled this after The Jungle Book; having never read it, I don't have much comment. The book itself is relatively episodic, detailing Bod's encounters with assorted graveyard denizens and with those outside of the graveyard. It concludes with Bod finally encountering the killer and venturing outside the graveyard (I don't think this is a spoiler, given that the book is a bildungsroman), and that is when we discover that all the episodic pieces are not so episodic after all.

I haven't read Gaiman for a while, largely for fear that a favorite author would become a former favorite author thanks to my own politics becoming more defined over the years. Graveyard Book wouldn't win the Tiptree or the Carl Brandon awards, but it also isn't offensive, which is really all I ask for sometimes. My standards have been so beaten down by all types of fail that currently, I just don't want to be slapped in the face.

I do wish the women in the book were more active; I liked all of them, especially Liza and Mrs. Lupesco, but I did feel as though they were more side characters when compared to Bod, Silas, and the man Jack. And, as usual, I wish there were more POC. I want a kind of book like this for kids of color, full of spookiness, drawing upon older genres and ghost stories.

I'm really impressed with how Gaiman manages to integrate the timeless graveyard with the modern world; ther's a mention of cell phones and computers, but it never feels jarring (as opposed to McKillip's Solstice Wood, frex).

All in all, this is a wonderfully spooky, mythic-feeling story, and I left feeling as though I had read an old classic rather than a book published last year. It feels ineffably large and has stayed with me for days.

This entry was originally posted at http://oyceter.dreamwidth.org/831371.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

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I found this to be very eye opening, but I also don't know much about global agriculture or environmental justice, so YMMV. I admit that I've been a bit skeptical of various environmental movements before, not because they're wrong, but because there are way too many examples of privileged white people espousing environmentalism while culturally appropriating and especially not thinking about how their movement fits in with other social justice movements. Patel specifically addresses these issues, especially in terms of class, colonization, and global agriculture.

Patel touches on a huge number of topics, from the rise of soy in everything we eat to high-fructose corn syrup to how big agricultural companies use genetically modified crops to control small farmers. But the central threads through the book are Patel's critique of the system that rewards big agricultural companies and the middlemen between farmers and consumers, how they are privileged over farmers and consumers, and his understanding of how this works globally. I find the last bit most helpful; Patel doesn't just look at the UK and the US, but focuses a lot on the Global South*. He also makes an effort to focus not just on the "big" players, but also on grassroots organizations and farmers themselves.

I had a problem with Sonia Shah's The Body Hunters, which is on big pharma, because I felt the focus was so much on those organizations that the people they were testing medicine on became a faceless crowd of victims. Patel does do this more in some chapters than others, but the sense I got from his writing was that he's worked very closely with the farmers he's writing about. As such, they come across as people, not victims. It also helps that he continually returns to solutions that small farmers and consumers have come up with; he focuses on how they help themselves, not on how the same international organizations that contributed to the poverty of the Global South are "saving" them.

One thing I took away from this book and others I've been reading (ex. Conquest, Dragon Ladies) is the power of bottom-up movements, how important it is for movements to focus on the people who are the most oppressed and have the least power in the system, because it generally seems easier to start there and end up with solutions that benefit everyone, whereas going from top-down tends to generate solutions that help those on top, but overlooks those on the bottom, particularly people who suffer more than one oppression. For example, feminism's focus on middle-class white women, the male focus in a lot of anti-racism and LGBTQ movements, etc. Of course, this is not saying that those of us who are more privileged should just not do anything, but just that we cannot center movements on the more privileged. I am still trying to figure out how to apply all this to my own attempts at social change and to IBARW, but right now, I have more questions than answers.

Anyway, highly recommended and very eye opening for me.

Links:
- furyofvissarion's review
- sanguinity's review


Note: Patel uses the term "people of colour" to describe non-white people (he is from the UK). I can't tell if this is only in the US edition, because it preserves the British spelling of "colour." I also can't remember if Patel footnoted or explained this usage or not; I, uh, already returned it to the library.

* He notes that he prefers this term over "developing countries" or "third-world countries." I have the same problems he does with the prior two terms, and I like that "Global South" does not sound like it is passing judgment, but I think it may overlook countries in the Northern hemisphere that also suffer the effects of colonization.

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*looks at date*

Er. Better late than never?

Once again, I read fewer books this year. On the other hand, only two books less than last year, so I think that is not bad, considering that I started grad school and all! And I managed to blog every book I read, with the exception of rereads.

The biggest change for me in 2008 was starting the 50books_poc challenge; namely, to read 50 books by POC in a year. I had originally done it from IBARW to IBARW (August 2007 to August 2008), but it's nice to know that I met it for the calendar year of 2008 as well. If anyone's interested about why, I wrote up why I count and how the challenge affected me during IBARW 3. Next year, my goal is to increase the percentage of books by POC so that it's over 50% of all the books I read, total. I'm still trying to make it enough of a habit that I won't have to count, and it's rather embarrassing to see the huge jump in numbers once I started making an effort. The gap between 13 books by POC versus 64 is enormous and indicative of my own aversive racism; it didn't actually take that much effort to find those 51 additional books (although a large part of that is thanks to my local libraries, and aversive racism plays its own role in book selection in libraries as well).

It is nice to see that I do not have to worry much about the percentage of women I'm reading.

As always, feel free to ask about anything here.

• ( Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian )



• ( M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: The Pox Party )



• ( Atul Gawande, Complications and Better )



• ( Justina Chen Headley, Girl Overboard )



• ( Maggie Helwig, Where She Was Standing )



• ( Angela Johnson, The First Part Last )



• ( David Mas Masumoto, Epitaph for a Peach )



• ( Andrea Smith, Conquest )



• ( Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales )



• ( Elizabeth E. Wein, The Mark of Solomon )

( Also recommended )

Total read: 129 (6 rereads)
51 by women of color, 64 by POC, 104 by women

( Complete list of books read in 2008 )

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Half a Crown concludes the Small Change or Still Life with Fascists trilogy, which also consists of Farthing and Ha'Penny.

It's 1960, eleven years after the events of Farthing and nineteen after a group of powerful British politicians brokered a peace with Hitler. Elvira, the adopted niece of Carmichael, is about to debut when she's drawn into the world of politics that her uncle inhabits.

I didn't like Ha'Penny as much as I liked Farthing. But I think Half a Crown is the strongest in the series, largely because it departs from the mystery format that worked so well with the first book and not so well with the second. Of course, this may be influenced by my not being much of a mystery reader. Part, though, is because the second and third books in the trilogy lack the element of surprise and discovery about the worldbuilding that's so intrinsic to Farthing, so what we're left with in Ha'Penny is a more standard mystery, not one that simultaneously works as mystery and worldbuilding.

I also found Half a Crown effective because it places Carmichael front and center; we've been waiting for his story after realizing he's the continuing thread that ties the books together, and it's good to get it at last.

( Spoilers )

I cried when I read this, and then I remembered elections and the change come January.

Links:
- oursin's review
- kate_nepveu's review

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Moist von Lipwig is a con man blessed with an unmemorable face. Alas, that wasn't enough to keep him out of Vetinari's prisons, and he's going to hang in the morning. Then Vetinari offers him the chance to live and reform Ankh-Morpork's ramshackle postal system (the offices are literally buried in mail), and Moist finds himself conning more people than ever.

I didn't expect to like this much, since I don't like the Ankh-Morpork books as much as some of the others, thanks to Pratchett's good-natured but largely unsuccessful attempts to talk about things like racism and sexism in the modern world. But I absolutely adore Moist, and I had tremendous amounts of fun following him from one scheme to another, each one more ludicrous and exaggerated than the last. I also love the chain-smoking Adora Belle Dearheart (also known as "Killer" or "Spike") to friends, all the clacksmen in the towers, and the characters at the post office. (Especially the clacksmen. I think it appeals to the geeky not-really-coding part of me.)

In Making Money, Moist is given a chance to overhaul the Ankh-Morpork Royal Bank. Alas, because of his reputation from Going Postal, he goes into this as the favorite, which makes everything less fun. There are much fewer of his crazy schemes, and there's actually not that much about the bank either. I ended up wanting more details about the switch to paper money and how that worked and all the background of working at a bank, but instead, we get a lot of schemes against Moist that don't have all that much to do with banking per se.

Still, I hope Pratchett does end up writing Moist in the IRS, since I think that will prompt great creativity on Moist's part, which are my favorite bits. I was laughing so hard at the end of Going Postal for the sheer audacity of it all.

Links:
- tenemet's review of Making Money
- kate_nepveu's review of Going Postal
- kate_nepveu's review of Making Money

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David Masumoto wrote an epitaph for the Sun Crest peach in a newspaper (apologies for the vague references; I returned the book already), mourning how its short shelf life and lack of red blush meant that firmer but less tasty peaches were taking its place on shelves. He apparently received enough responses to persuade him to devote a year to try and save his peaches; the book is in some ways a story about how he does so, but it's really more the chronicle of a year of life on a farm. That's probably one of the few criticisms I can offer of the book—I desperately want to know what happened to his goal to save the Sun Crest, and I wish the edition I read had some sort of "ten years later" epilogue telling me what happened.

Other than not having an answer to my question, this book is wonderful. Masumoto's prose is lyrical, but he deals with the hard realities of farm life as well. It's still not quite the same as someone whose entire living depends on the farm (Masumoto's wife works in another industry to support the farm), but he captures the struggle between trying to act environmentally and naturally and trying to keep the farm going.

I also love the snippets of Japanese American history in the book. Masumoto is sansei, and though the book isn't about the Japanese-American experience, it's hard to keep out of the book, since so much of his family history has to do with internment and his grandparents not being able to own property.

But mostly, I love the story of the farm, of freak rainstorms that can ruin raisin crops, of cover crops and wildflowers, of peach-eating pests and fertilizer. Reading this book made me feel happy and fulfilled and at peace. Highly recommended.

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After living in China for a few years, Jen Lin-Liu decides to take a class in Chinese cooking and ends up interning at fancy restaurants and noodle stands, all the while dealing with class, gender, and race in a rapidly changing nation. The book's a combination of memoir, food journalism, and China studies, and it includes recipes.

My very favorite parts were, of course, about the food, particularly Lin-Liu's stint as a noodle-maker, in which she worked at a street-side shaved noodle stand! Though I also loved a look at the fancy Shanghainese restaurant she later interned at, part of me wished she had done a working tour of many different street stands and/or small, hole-in-the-wall restaurants. But mostly, I loved reading about making dumplings, the quest for the perfect xiao long bao in Shanghai, discovering Huaiyang cuisine, and adventurous eating. She tries dog, yes, but the meal that probably takes the cake is one that serves penis in everything. I got the impression that the meals including dog and penis and whatnot were considered weird by Chinese standards as well, whereas ones including offal or various internal organs or fish heads are not. I am guessing this holds in Taiwan as well, as I do not know anyone who's eaten the first two and many people who have eaten the latter, myself included.

Also, fish head is tasty.

The bits when the author learns more about China's history and the aftermath of the Communist Revolution were interesting to me, but slightly less so, possibly because I've heard a lot of stories of the Cultural Revolution growing up, and possibly because I was just in Shanghai this summer. I do like the way she writes things up, but there's always the barrier of her Chinese-American childhood and class, as even her paltry salary as a journalist in China put her solidly in the upper-middle class. The class issues are particularly emphasized when she is in cooking class, as it's a vocational class for an non-prestigious, difficult job.

She also writes about migrants from more rural areas coming to Beijing to try to make it and how they're frequently talked about like immigrants (legal and illegal) are talked about in the US. And, well, there's a lot of stuff in the book. There was an incidence of ablism that was disturbing, and there's the class thing, but I did think that Lin-Liu was trying to think about these issues, as well as think about her own role as a Chinese-American woman living in China.

And did I mention the food? Reading this made me so hungry and homesick that I went through old trip photos to drool.

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Mau is going through his nation's ritual to become a man, but when he sails back from Boy Island, he discovers that the entire village and nation have been wiped out by a giant wave. Also there is the shipwrecked Daphne, who finds that all her training to be a British lady has taught her absolutely nothing useful. Soon, more survivors of the tsunami come to the island, and Mau finds himself chief, even though he's not even a man by his nation's standards.

Despite my classification, this is only nominally fantasy, in that it seems to be a slightly alternate version of our world in the 1800s. And there may or may not be dead ancestors and gods talking to Mau. And despite the book being published as YA, it's rather dark at points, given the demise of everyone Mau knows. Pratchett handles it very well; there's a constant reminder of what Mau has lost without dwelling on it too much, and the touches of humor felt like Mau and Daphne trying to make sense of their new world and didn't contrast too much with the darker tone of the book.

The thing about rebuilding/building civilization isn't as much of a draw for me as it is for some others, especially since I was wary about the racial politics. But Pratchett does a good job of not making the nation into something primitive, and he effectively contrasts the more "exotic" practices of the nation with those of white Britain, which look equally impractical and constructed. I do think the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism wasn't taken apart as much as I wanted, but I'm also unsure of how Pratchett might have done that in a YA book without making it All About Colonialism.

Still, it's uncomfortably there in the background, and it made me very uncomfortable when Mau was doing a lot of things for Daphne (the "native" man/white woman dichotomy). That disappeared pretty quickly, though, and I very much liked that while Daphne poked fun or didn't understand some traditions of the nation, she actually adapted them very well.

I also love the twist that comes near the end.

And I really liked the ending, which felt real to me.

I know other people have read this; send me links if you have write-ups!

Links:
- gwyneira's review
- kate_nepveu's review

ETA: some spoilers in comments, mostly ROT13'ed, but some not!

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Despite it only being June, I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is going to be one of the best books I read this year.

I'm not even sure where to begin. It's an incredible piece of work that synthesizes Smith's work with Native women and against sexual violence and colonialism. Smith argues that putting Native women and women of color at the forefront of feminist analysis, scholarship, and activism can only help feminism, particularly when it comes to the US feminist movement's poor track record when it comes to intersectionality. I am, of course, generalizing as to what comprises "the" US feminist movement, though I think it's fair to say that mainstream US feminism has largely been white, middle class, able bodied, and heterosexual.

Some of what Smith writes about was already known to me, largely in thanks to the anti-racist blogosphere and LJ comms, but much of it is still unfortunately new news to me. Smith traces the history of colonization and the genocide of American Indians from the past (which most of us know about) to the present (which isn't covered much at all in the media or textbooks), and the book is particularly strong when Smith links sexual violence against Native women in the form of forced sterilization, medical experimentation (particularly with birth control drugs), and domestic violence with the forcing of white patriarchy onto American Indians, the rape of American Indian people and lands and spirituality in the form of cultural appropriation, and the ongoing and current genocide of American Indians.

What startled me most were the dates in the book: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 (the book was published in 2003). Depo-Provera, Norplant. Statistics and knowledge about how few rapists of Native women are ever caught, thanks to the very broken criminal justice system and the BIA. This shouldn't be startling knowledge; but outside the anti-racist blogosphere, you barely hear about these things, and I'm fairly sure it's not common news in the white feminist blogosphere. Smith hammers in again and again that the United States is a nation formed via the genocide of an entire people, and that that genocide is still happening, particularly as the government and corporations try to cash in on the natural resources on many reservations.

I am not even covering half of what I found exciting about the book, but the core of it is how Smith reads what is normally read as racial or cultural violence as sexual violence. Just... *flails* READ THIS.

Links:
- coffeeandink's review
- sanguinity's review

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This is the conclusion to The Lion Hunter.

( Spoilers for The Lion Hunter )

I think vacation has rotted my brain, as I cannot think of anything to say except: "Go read!"

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This is for the 10th POC in SF Carnival, hosted by karnythia!

I joined 50books_poc last year to try to get myself to read more POC; I had unofficially been trying before, but without numbers or statistics, it was hard to see if I had been successful or not. While there were a few SF/F authors of color, the vast majority, as judging from my library shelves, were white. And I didn't feel up to reading the POC authors I largely did know, since most of the ones I'd heard of wrote Great Literary Tomes or Books Assigned in English Class.

While I have nothing against Great Literary Tomes, my brain has been on vacation for a while, and I wanted fluff. Happy, easy-to-read fluff. So I went through the few POC in YA recs that I had, and asked LJ and my YA librarian for more. A lot of the older POC-authored titles in YA focus on weighty issues like oppression, racism, Japanese internment, gangs, teen pregnancy, and etc., and again, while I have nothing against these books and feel it's necessary to have them, my brain wasn't up for it. Which is how I ended up consuming truckloads of YA chicklit by POC (or starring POC, though for 50books_poc, I tried to focus on POC authors).

Many of these were gathered via my librarian and internet recs and my flist, but in a desperate attempt to find more POC authors, I took to randomly browsing the library shelves and looking at author names. Because of this, I tended to find more Asian and Latina authors. I have a whole 'nother post on how awkward this made me feel, but that can wait till IBARW.

So here's a partial list of what I've found. Most of it is YA chicklit, which I find I like better than adult chicklit, due to the relative lack of conspicuous consumption and incompetence in the workplace, but some are just really good books that I stuck in there.

Assume authors are POC unless otherwise specified. Links are to my LJ write ups if I've read the book in question.

( Highly recommended )

( Recommended )

( More books )

Links:
- The Brown Bookshelf (focuses more on children's)
- The YA YA YAs list of Asian-American protagonists in YA fiction
- YA chick lit with POC post with recs in comments

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Sisters May, Palmer, and Brooks Gold are still coping after their father's recent death. Middle sister May is saddled with responsibilities, including learning to drive so she can help her mother out; older sister Brooks is drinking; and younger sister Palmer is quietly freaking out as everyone continues to ignore her. It's a slow, quiet story of how things fall apart and even more slowly begin to heal, and while most of it is from May's POV, we get a lot of Brooks and Palmer as well.

This and Bermudez Triangle are my favorite of Johnson's books, largely because both of them focus less on an external plot and more on the characters' growth, particularly how all the characters affect each other. The Golds feel so real, from the tired mother to the sibling squabbling to the way people ask things of you when you have nothing left to give, the way they're too busy when you're about to fall down, and just when everything's about to come apart, everything begins to come together again.

I particularly loved Palmer and her fear, the way she faded into walls to watch. It was harder to love Brooks, who's mostly lost in a chemical haze, and I see a lot of myself in May, from the desperate attempts to grab control to the way she pushes people away just when she needs them most. Though the romance between May and boy-next-door Pete wasn't the center of the book, I liked it, particularly the last bits.

But most of all, I loved the three sisters and the absence of their dad, an empty space that affects everything. I love the way Johnson weaves baseball in throughout, from their dad, Palmer, and Brooks' love of it to May's inability to play, and how it all fits together in the end. I, um, sort of bawled through the entire last half of the book, where everyone's broken bits come together, but things end up okay. Definitely recommended, especially if you like authors like Sarah Dessen.

Links:
- rilina's review
- gwyneira's review

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So in love with this book! So in love!

It was originally published in Korea, then translated here, and each author has written other books about Korean clothing as well. This is a fairly general book; it goes into hats and veils, hairpins, jackets and vests, shoes, skirts and pants, and jackets. There's not much of an overview of Korean history. The introduction is a history of hanbok and its ornaments, and I recognize several of the paintings from the other Korean clothing book I read.

But then it goes into costume porn details! And how!

My scanner is not working, so you have to make do with photos instead (pardon the flash; my hands shake too much to take pictures without).

The book begins each section with a brief explanation and history of the clothing (or ornaments) involved (roughly 2-3 pages). Then it looks at actual samples for the next ten or so pages. As in, there's a photograph of the object in question, a brief description, and then sketches. Lots of sketches! Sketches detailing exactly what kind of seams were used and how much allowance was made and how the piece was put together and all the different parts and people! I AM IN LOVE!

And if that weren't enough, after they've gone through a good number of samples, there are detailed close ups! And the book is roughly 1 ft. by 1 ft., so these are not small pictures!

( Clothing details )

And! desdenova! The section on hats actually talks about the hat decorations! Alas, not the feathers on the top of the hats, but it talks about the hat strings! As far as I can tell, they were largely ornamental and not symbolic, though I think non-noblemen weren't allowed to wear tortoiseshell beads. Also, confirmation that the material of the buttons (gwanja) on the men's head wrap (manggeon) denotes rank (made of jade, gold or silver, with jade being the highest rank, I suspect).

I think the only bad things I can say about the book is that none of the samples have dates (I particularly wanted to know for the eyeglass cases and the rubber-soled shoes), that it only covers Joseon (as expected, given the fragility of clothing), and that it has no little cloth samples (some day...). Other than that, this is a costume nut's dream.

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I ran to get this after I finished Gawande's Better. I think I may like it a smidgen better than Better, even though this is an earlier book, but most of that is simply subject-matter preference on my part. Both books are very well-written, compulsive reads.

While Better is on improving systems, Complications is about when systems fail, particularly systems in the medical industry. That said, Gawande also looks at imperfections in medicine overall, from uncertainty in diagnoses to the need for residents to get practice vs. the right of patients to get the best care possible to who is to blame when something in a hospital goes wrong.

As in Better, I enjoy reading Gawande partly because of his prose, but mainly because of how he manages to talk about things. In most of his essays, I can't actually tell how the cases will go or what the outcome will be, which is a nice change. I also like the way Gawande discusses issues; he gives the impression of having thought a lot about various angles and pros and cons.

I suspect some parts of this book may gross people out, given that Gawande goes into surgery, flesh-eating bacteria, and the medical procedure for inserting a line into a patient's chest vein (I think it was the vena cava? But I may be wrong). Parts of it made me twitch, but I am also fascinated by things like this. For reference, my favorite parts of Peeps were the parasite chapters. Still, even if you can't read the more graphically detailed sections, I'd rec the other essays anyway, as they're fascinating looks into the world of surgery and into how the medical system works in practice, successes and failures alike.

I vaguely remember someone on the flist posting about Gawande not talking about big pharma? Anyone? Bueller?

Anyway, very cool book, hope Gawande writes something new soon.

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Junior has lived all his life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, but he decides to attend a non-reservation (read: all white) school in an attempt to find hope. His move ends up breaking apart his friendship with Rowdy, and soon, Junior has to fight for acceptance in both his new school and back at the reservation.

As an added bonus, he wants to be a cartoonist, so we get some truly hilarious cartoons (I love the romance novel cover lampoons). The book is illustrated by Ellen Forney.

Alexie does awesome voice in this book; Junior is sarcastic, funny, heartbreaking, and struggling to make sense of everything, usually at the same time. He doesn't overlook the desperate circumstances on the rez, but he also doesn't downplay just how much white complicity there is in that, from the white savior teachers to pretendians. I loved how complex Alexie made Junior's decision; how he does find more opportunities off the rez, but also how betrayed the rez feels, and how all this plays out in local basketball.

While the book is very funny, largely thanks to Junior's voice, it's also very depressing at times, just because of the circumstances in the rez, from the influence of alcohol to the way poverty and racism just keep grinding people down and down and down. Alexie is very good at navigating tragedy and humor all at once; what could be pathos is instead just Junior's harsh reality, but the book still avoids being a problem novel, largely by being very aware of the political complexity involved in Junior's life.

Definitely recommended; I'm looking for more of Alexie's books now.

Links:
- rachelmanija's review
- minnow1212's review
- gwyneira's review